There are things that should be done as often as possible as an antidote to the wear and tear of everyday life. Our very personal and completely arbitrary choice falls on listening to a song by Simon & Garfunkel, reading a few pages of a novel by Jane Austen, savoring a poem by Emily Dickinson and… watching a film by John Ford in absolute solitude.
The choice is wide among the dozens of masterpieces that the great American director has created in more than half a century of career. We lean, always in a very personal and arbitrary way, towards the most classic of the classics of the western genre: Red Shadows from 1939. The reasons are soon explained: it is a film that is as simple in its plot as it is profound in its filmic development. It's a story for the mind, poetry for the heart, visual symphony for the eyes. And then there's the action, the adventure, the common sense, the happy ending. There's Monument Valley and there's John Wayne. In short, it is a film that brings together Ford's entire narrative and ideal universe at its best.
Ombre rosse also acts as Ariadne's thread in the volume "The world according to John Ford" (Jimenez editions, 2023, Euro 20, pp. 272) with which the journalist and critic Alberto Crespi celebrates the great American filmmaker in a very personal and intimate way occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his disappearance, which took place on August 31, 1973. "The world according to John Ford" is, in fact, very far from the classic film criticism essay. It is an act of love and gratitude towards a director who has given so many moments of happiness, entertainment, emotion, emotion and reflection not only to Crespi, but to hundreds of millions of viewers around the world. The volume, says the author himself, is a "crazy and desperate" attempt to tell the poetry of John Ford and travel in his world. And it is a passionate and exciting journey, a first-person story that offers a myriad of food for thought, curiosities, connections and suggestions and, above all, reveals the very original poetics that mark the director's work.
In order to achieve this goal, which is certainly not simple, Alberto Crespi renounces any type of chronological, biographical or genre itinerary, such as Ford's western and non-western films. He is guided by the diligence of Ombre rosse to create a thematic itinerary in the Fordian imagination. It could not have been otherwise for Crespi, we discover it from the first pages of the book. Red Shadows is the film that started it all. It is the perfect film that Orson Welles saw dozens of times, adopting it as a kind of cinematography manual before directing Citizen Kane in 1940.
Crespi then took the nine passengers of the stagecoach of Red Shadows and each of them becomes the starting point for a chapter: speaking of Ringo/John Wayne we analyze the figure of the Fordian hero, speaking of Dallas/Claire Trevor we discover that Ford is a very more "feminine" than you think, and so on. In addition to the nine passengers, in Red Shadows there are two other protagonists. The Indians, of course, and Monument Valley, the landscape that Ford discovers in that film and which for many fans has become the Far West par excellence.
Nine characters plus two: eleven chapters during which Crespi enters and exits Ford's films without scruples, with absolute freedom and offers the reader the keys to understanding how the director has interpreted the world and how, consequently, he has narrated it in his cinema: a cinema in which one laughs and cries at the same time; a cinema in which adventure, the West, history, violence (never gratuitous, never exalted), frontiers always mix with submerged irony, the sense of family and community, the pain of loss and the passage of deliveries from one generation to the next.
In our opinion it turns out that John Ford had the soul of the great humanist and deeply believed in the best qualities of the human being. Those qualities of solidarity, brotherhood, common sense and trust in others that allow us to be inclusive and tolerant without the cold rules of political correctness. Her heroines, multiple and wonderfully modern, her heroes were often loners, they weren't always successful, but they knew their place in the world and what choices to make so that the community could thrive. John Ford's world was not an Eden, but it was certainly animated by goodwill and a sense of justice. Maybe that's why we miss him so much.
